'All About Lily Chou-Chou'

Shunji Iwai's "All About Lily Chou-Chou" is bravura, ambitious and profoundly disturbing. It is also a daunting, demanding experience, one whose complex structure makes it a challenge to track despite literate subtitles.

Not everyone will be willing to go the 146-minute distance of a film that can be maddeningly hard to follow and uncompromisingly bleak. But those who do will have felt just how all-important music can be to unhappy and endangered teenagers and how savagery can sweep over young people, even in the most seemingly stable and prosperous communities.

Iwai's go-for-broke cinematographer Noboru Shinoda's first shot is of Yuichi Hasumi (Hayato Ichihara, in a remarkable highly internalized characterization), a slim, handsome boy standing in a rice field holding his CD player and listening to Lily Chou-Chou, a Bjork-like singer who has captivated him and countless other Japanese teens. We then see a gang of teens, aboard a train, steal a dozing businessman's briefcase and later, looting boxfuls of CDs from a music store.

We discover that all of this is taking place in a spacious, attractive city somewhere in Japan, where the gangbangers and Yuichi attend a very large junior high, a model of sleek, functional architectural design.

Yuichi, whose mother is a hairdresser and whose home is small but well-furnished, has pretty much withdrawn into the world of Lily's shimmering, reassuring, ethereal music. When he's not listening to her or doing his homework, he is on the Internet, where he's set up a Lily-philia Web site and is comforted by connecting via constant e-mail with other admirers of her music.

One day, however, model good kid that he is, Yuichi is caught swiping a Lily CD. This makes the gang sure he has ratted on them, and they subject him to a beating so vicious and humiliating that we can only be grateful that it is so discreetly presented.

Then we're subjected to an abrupt cut to what has got to be a flashback. We are shocked to discover that the gang's leader, Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari) has reached out to Yuichi for friendship because Hoshino has been subjected to widespread ridicule for being an outstanding student.

It is he who introduces Yuichi to Lily's music, but its seductive promise surely seems a sham to him ultimately. A rich kid, Hoshino, has taken up kendo, a Japanese sport of swordplay, at school and manages to transform himself from "class wimp to class president."

Besides Yuichi, Hoshino has attracted other friends, and they take a vacation to Okinawa, at which point Shinoda switches to a restless, jabbing, hand-held camera style of shooting for a deliberately unsettling effect.

The islands off Okinawa are beautiful, primitive, exotic, sensual and dangerous. In the distance is an island said to be especially beautiful, and Yuichi identifies it with a paradise Lily sings about in a song.

But the boys encounter a naturalist who cheerfully tells them that his observations of the flora and fauna of the islands suggest that the region is a hell on Earth, where a tree that strangles other trees thrives. Then Hoshino nearly drowns.

Back home is soon hell on Earth for Yuichi and others. So shaken is Hoshino by his brush with death and his family's sudden loss of its textile mill that he has become a vicious marauder who terrorizes his school mates. He blackmails a sweet girl, Shiori Tsuda (Yu Aoi), into a dire fate as a street prostitute. With the tacit approval of girls who hate Yoko Kuno (Ayumi Ito) for her beauty and talent as a pianist, Hoshino's thugs subject her to a terrible gang rape and shave her head.

No wonder Yuichi has all but retreated from the savage real world around him into Lily's soothing music. Not surprisingly, this most operatic of films climaxes with an inevitable showdown between Yuichi and Hoshino.

(Takeshi Kobayashi's music and songs are uncannily right for the hypnotic Lily, who is only barely glimpsed at a concert and whose voice is supplied by an unbilled singer.)

The school' s faculty and staff, who are kind and well-meaning, haven't a clue about what's going on. While Iwai creates plenty of incidents in which the kids' zealous, regimented brutality and swift allegiance to a strong, sadistic leader jar memories of the boundless, frenzied militarism of World War II Japan, the feral behavior of Hoshino and his followers is simply too widely spread not to have parallels wherever traditional social structures are crumbling, leaving kids dangerously disaffected.

With its sweeping juxtapositions of the beautiful and the terrible in both the aural and the visual, "All About Lily Chou-Chou" is continually jarring. Although the film's narrative thread may prove chronically elusive, Iwai's depiction of what life can be like for far too many teens comes across loud and clear.

Unrated. Times guidelines: extreme violence, mainly off-screen, and aura of brutality. Some language.